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Encycling Problematic Wickedness for Potential Humanity Imagining a Future Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential -- / Alternative view of segmented documents via Kairos 24 February 2014 | Draft Encycling Problematic Wickedness for Potential Humanity Imagining a future Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential -- / -- Introduction Learnings from the past? Requisite craziness? Problems, problematique and wickedness? Ensuring identity through property and possession? Global "world", or requisite topology of higher dimensionality? Human potential versus Potential humanity? Encycling rather than Encyclopedia: dynamic versus static? Questing for an imaginal episystemic container: embodying self-reflexivity? Mankind 2000 and Union of International Associations -- "reloaded"? Engendering engaging manageable "content"? Encycling Problematic Wickedness and Potential Humanity? References Introduction In 1972 a project was instigated to produce a compilation of world problems as variously perceived by several thousand international organizations and constituencies profiled in the Yearbook of International Organizations of the Union of International Associations. This was in reaction to the extremely selective focus of the project of the Club of Rome which took the form of the widely-publicized report on The Limits to Growth (1972). That focus of the Club was associated with some degree of internal dissent resulting in its disassociation from The Predicament of Mankind (1970), as articulated by Hasan Ozbekhan. The focus also later resulted in the separate initiative of Ervin Laszlo through which the Club of Budapest was created. These various threads are separately reviewed (Club of Rome Reports and Bifurcations: a 40-year overview, 2012; Alexander Christakis, A Retrospective Structural Inquiry of the Predicament of Mankind Prospectus of the Club of Rome, 2006). The World Problems Project, as it was known, only became possible in 1972 through collaboration with Mankind 2000 -- a body with a specific concern for human development, namely the concern neglected by the Club of Rome. The preoccupation with "Mankind" had been the focus of the International Futures Research Inaugural Conference (Oslo, 1967) convened by Mankind 2000 (founded in 1964), on the instigation of James Wellesley-Wesley, and resulting in publication of a selection of the papers (edited by Johan Galtung and Robert Jungk, Mankind 2000, 1969). Contrasting "world problems" and "human development" within the same context suggested a necessary degree of complementarity whose nature remained to be discovered. The result was the Yearbook of World Problems and Human Potential, published in 1976 -- then seen as complementary to the Yearbook of International Organizations. Since that period, "world problems" and "human potential" have been variously combined and profiled in the form of a succession of editions of what was renamed as the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential. With further support from Mankind 2000, this notably included substantial profiling of the many strategies undertaken or envisaged by international organizations within a Global Strategies Project. An online variant has been produced through funding from the European Commission, with a special emphasis on visualization of the complex networks relating problems, strategies and organizations in particular. A proposal for a further extension was approved for funding by the World Bank, although that funding did not become available due to other urgent priorities at the time. These developments are conveniently described in the Wikipedia profile on the Encyclopedia. With the numerous possibilities now offered by technology and the web, the question is how it might be appropriate and fruitful to reframe for the future an "Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential". The relevance of the question lies in the questionable ability of the governance of a global knowledge-based civilization to engage with "problems", using viable "strategies", such as to enhance "human potential". After decades of initiatives by international bodies and their local counterparts, there is a case for asking whether there is a need to "think otherwise" in order to achieve what has proven to be seemingly impossible. As increasingly recognized, the world would appear to be sliding into an ever more chaotic condition -- with a strong possibility of financial, environmental, and other forms of collapse. The purpose here is to focus on the form that "thinking otherwise" might take -- given the learnings associated with production of an Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential over decades. Appropriate guidance for such reflection is provided by the much- cited adage of George Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Expressed otherwise, the issue might be framed as the nature of the necessarily "deadly question" relating to the future, as separately discussed (World Futures Conference as Catastrophic Question: from performance to morphogenesis and transformation, 2013). What recent instances of "new thinking" by the international community can be cited as an inspiration to the world -- capable of eliciting collective confidence in the future? Learnings from the past? Any approach to the nature of learnings from the past faces the widely recognized challenge of information overload and constrained attention time. A major learning is that even consideration of such learning is a challenge. A report to the Club of Rome in 1980 proclaimed that there were no such limits (James W Botkin, Mahdi Elmandjra and Mircea Malitza, No Limits to Learning; bridging the human gap, 1979). A critical review focused on its omission of consideration of collective memory (Societal Learning and the Erosion of Collective Memory, 1980). This followed an earlier exercise in identifying more general limits (Limits to Human Potential, 1976) -- a theme explored by others (Ervin Laszlo, Inner Limits of Mankind: heretical reflections on today's values, culture and politics, 1989; Peter Seidel, Invisible Walls: why we ignore the damage we inflict on the planet... and ourselves, 2001). In the context of this argument, the review of the questionable learnings from thirty years of Club of Rome reports is itself indication of a challenging failure of collective learning (Graham Turner, A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality, 2007). The "meta-challenge" is then one of how to clarify the failure of learning in a succinct manner. One approach is to provide a focus through strategic questions (Strategic Implications of 12 Unasked Questions in Response to Disaster, 2013). This had been a late consideration in development of the Encyclopedia (Generating a Million Questions from UIA Databases: Problems, Strategies, Values, 2006). Other possibilities for consideration can be variously argued: Lipoproblems: Developing a Strategy Omitting a Key Problem -- the systemic challenge of climate change and resource issues, 2009 Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid", 2003 Enabling Collective Intelligence in Response to Emergencies, 2010 Disastrous Floods as Indicators of Systemic Risk Neglect: implications for authoritative response to future surprises, 2009 Anticipating Future Strategic Triple Whammies -- in the light of earthquake-tsunami-nuclear misconceptions, 2011 Superquestions for Supercomputers: avoiding terra flops from misguided dependence on teraflops? 2010 Critical thinking vs. Specious arguments: web resources, 2001 Engaging with Questions of Higher Order: cognitive vigilance required for higher degrees of twistedness, 2004 Remedial Capacity Indicators versus Performance Indicators, 1981 Embodiment of Change: Comprehension, Traction and Impact? Discovering enabling questions for the future, 2011 Recognizing the Psychosocial Boundaries of Remedial Action: constraints on ensuring a safe operating space for humanity, 2009 Such arguments themselves fail to address the need for succinctness, as can be potentially rendered through "mappings", as follows -- notably onto complex polyhedral forms: Convergence of 30 Disabling Global Trends: mapping the social climate change engendering a perfect storm, 2012 Map of Systemic Interdependencies None Dares Name: 12-fold challenge of global life and death, 2011 Mind Map of Global Civilizational Collapse: why nothing is happening in response to global challenges, 2011 Mapping the Global Underground: articulating Insightful Population Constraint Consideration (IPCC), 2010 Configuring Globally and Contending Locally: shaping the global network of local bargains by decoding and mapping Earth Summit inter-sectoral issues, 1992 Complementary Knowledge Analysis / Mapping Process, 2006 Towards Polyhedral Global Governance: complexifying oversimplistic strategic metaphors, 2008 Some more complex possibilities have been explored with respect to that Encyclopedia initiative: Experimental SVG Representations of Entity Interrelationships 2007 Preliminary NetMap Studies of Databases on Questions, World Problems, Global Strategies, and Values, 2006) Simulating a Global Brain using networks of international organizations, world problems, strategies, and values, 2001) Of potential interest is whether future simulations will enable more creative learning in relation to such matters -- and what will be designed out of such possibilities,, perhaps inadvertently? Will the projected "Living Earth Simulator", of the FuturIcT EU research initiative -- a 10 year 1 billion EUR program "to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to" -- offer more comprehensible maps
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